Yes, When I'm Not Watching SF TV, I'm Reading About It.

I've just started reading this really nifty book: Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy Television by Joe Nazzaro, which features interviews with the brains behind a whole bunch of different SF/Fantasy TV shows, including Buffy, Babylon 5, Xena, Red Dwarf, etc. etc. So far I've only read the first four -- Rockne S. O'Bannon on Farscape, Chris Carter on The X-Files, Howard Chaykin on Mutant X (even though I never watched the show), and Terrance Dicks on Doctor Who -- but I can already say that, if this is at all the sort of thing you're interested in, this book is well worth picking up. (It's a British book, though, so if you're one of my fellow Americans, you'll have to order it from overseas like I did.) Lots of stuff about the everyday ins and outs of what it's like writing and producing a TV show, lots of interesting specifics about what the writers' attitudes are towards the particular shows they were working on, and lots of little tidbits of the kind that are bound to be of interest to fans.

For instance, to continue with the Doctor Who theme I seem to have going on this blog lately, I just read something in the Terrance Dicks interview that I thought was terribly amusing. I'd always thought that the reason they'd had the Doctor stranded on Earth at the start of Pertwee's stint had something to do with some creative vision for the show, some desire to change the formula or to tell a particular kind of story. It didn't. It had to do with the budget. London streets, after all, are much cheaper to film than strange alien planets! (Dicks, for the record, hated this idea and reversed it as soon as he could.)

O'Bannon had a lot of interesting things to say, too, not just about Farscape, but also about what he'd wanted do with Seaquest DSV... Which, if they'd followed through on it, might have actually resulted in a show I'd have been interested in watching.

Next up is an interview with Paul Donovan of Lexx. Now, that should be fun!